Towards Explainable Multi-Label Text Classification: A Multi-Task Rationalisation Framework for Identifying Indicators of Forced Labour

Erick Mendez Guzman, Viktor Schlegel, Riza Batista-Navarro


Abstract
The importance of rationales, or natural language explanations, lies in their capacity to bridge the gap between machine predictions and human understanding, by providing human-readable insights into why a text classifier makes specific decisions. This paper presents a novel multi-task rationalisation approach tailored to enhancing the explainability of multi-label text classifiers to identify indicators of forced labour. Our framework integrates a rationale extraction task with the classification objective and allows the inclusion of human explanations during training. We conduct extensive experiments using transformer-based models on a dataset consisting of 2,800 news articles, each annotated with labels and human-generated explanations. Our findings reveal a statistically significant difference between the best-performing architecture leveraging human rationales during training and variants using only labels. Specifically, the supervised model demonstrates a 10% improvement in predictive performance measured by the weighted F1 score, a 15% increase in the agreement between human and machine-generated rationales, and a 4% improvement in the generated rationales’ comprehensiveness. These results hold promising implications for addressing complex human rights issues with greater transparency and accountability using advanced NLP techniques.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4pi-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Daryna Dementieva, Oana Ignat, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea, Giorgio Piatti, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Jieyu Zhao
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
98–112
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Erick Mendez Guzman, Viktor Schlegel, and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2024. Towards Explainable Multi-Label Text Classification: A Multi-Task Rationalisation Framework for Identifying Indicators of Forced Labour. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, pages 98–112, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Explainable Multi-Label Text Classification: A Multi-Task Rationalisation Framework for Identifying Indicators of Forced Labour (Guzman et al., NLP4PI 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.8.pdf